


rubik's cubes

by romajstorovic



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Holt siblings is so good!!, Trans Girl Pidge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-11 00:34:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16465292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romajstorovic/pseuds/romajstorovic
Summary: "There's no way you'll beat me this time," an eight year old Katie Holt declares, handing the Rubik's cube, so expertly mixed up, back to her older brother. He takes it, returning Katie's to her."You sure about that?" A sixteen year old Matt Holt winks. "You'd better prove it, then."Or: Pidge and her emotional attachment to rubik's cubes throughout the years.





	rubik's cubes

**Author's Note:**

> It's been so long and I forgot to post this whoops

"There's no way you'll beat me this time," an eight year old Katie Holt declares, handing the Rubik's cube, so expertly mixed up, back to her older brother. He takes it, returning Katie's to her.

"You sure about that?" A sixteen year old Matt Holt winks. "You'd better prove it, then."

"Okay," Katie says, determined. She's going to beat him this time. This time for sure. Never mind that he's a whole _eight years_ older than her, or that he's out training to visit planets whilst she's stuck learning things she already knows. She's going to win.

Matt taps at his phone, setting a stopwatch. Katie knows he wants to beat his record of 34.7 seconds. Neither of them are the best at Rubik's cubes, but they're pretty good compared to the rest of their family.

"Ready?" Matt asks, and Katie nods, itching to start. She turns the cube over, checking all the sides, and her analytical mind is already working out the first dozen or so moves. "Go!" Her brother says, and the room is silenced bar the clicking of the cubes.

Thirty two point nine seconds later, Matt taps his phone to stop the timer, letting out a whoop of celebration. "Yes!" He cries. "New record!"

Pidge lets out a frustrated groan. She's so close to finishing hers, and makes the last few turns whilst glaring at her brother. "I was nearly there," she grumbles, and Matt slides round so they're next to each other, rather than opposite.

"It's okay, Pidge," he grins, ruffling her hair. "I've had eight more years than you to practice. By the time you reach my age you'll definitely beat me. You just need to practice."

"I hate it when you call me that," Katie whines, but leans her head on Matt's shoulder. She doesn't mind when he wraps his arm around her shoulder, though. 

-x-

A ten year old Katie Holt is lying with her head on her desk, dejectedly flicking her Rubik's cube into its solution. She checks the timer. 24.6 seconds. It's good, but not good enough. Matt is still a whole four seconds faster than her.

There's a knock on her door, and an eighteen year old whole-four-seconds-faster-than-her Matt Holt comes in, holding a piece of cake on a plate. He brings a fork in his other hand and places them on Katie's desk, next to her timer.

"What's up, Pidge?" He asks. He moved back to sit on her bed, back against the wall. He fiddles with the Rubik's cube in his pocket, and Katie notices, not for the first time, how similar they are.

"People at school again. I don't want to be smart. If I wasn't smart then they wouldn't make fun of me. I just wish they wouldn't."

Matt pats the bed next to him, but Katie doesn't sit with him. She's too upset, so settles for turning her chair around to face her brother. He smiles, and she's confused. Normally he'd come over and hug her, promising to use all his Garrison training to fight the bullies away. But not this time.

"Y'know, being smart isn't a bad thing. Apart from my good looks and my muscles-" he pauses to flex- "it was my smarts that got me on the Kerberos mission."

Katie nearly falls out of her chair in her surprise. "You got on the mission?" She shrieks.

Matt nods, eyes twinkling. "I sure did. Me and Dad and Shiro. We're all going."

Katie throws herself at her brother, enveloping him in a hug before rushing back to her desk and opening a textbook that's almost as thick as a car tyre.

"What are you doing?" Matt asks, confused.

"Studying," Katie explains. "I wanna become smart like you so that I can go to other planets and moons too. Do you think there's going to be a mission to Pluto itself?"

"I think there might be," Matt grins, standing up. "I'll leave you to study."

"Wait!" Katie cries. "Another race. It's been two weeks since we've had one. Please?"

Matt sits back down, throwing his cube to Katie as she throws hers to him. They mix up the cubes whilst chatting about what Matt's going to do on the Kerberos mission- mostly, he he says, it's collecting ice samples and analysing them. He admits it sounds boring, but he's spent his whole life working towards this mission and the science behind what forms the ice.

"There might even be elements we haven't discovered yet! If we find one, I'll call it 'mattium'," he declares, and Katie snorts.

"Sure," she says sarcastically.

"I will! I'm going to find one now, just to prove it."

"Mhm. You wanna set a timer?"

Matt nods and unlocks his phone, tapping on it to start the timer. Katie goes through her pre-race ritual of looking at each side quickly, but does it slower than usual and registers Matt's signal to begin a whole second later than when he says it.

She hisses at herself, annoyed, and forces herself to relax and let her fingers to the thinking. She's full of pent up frustration though, and takes almost forty five seconds to solve it. She throws the cube down to the floor in disgust and gloomily picks at the cake.

Matt pats her on the shoulder in consolation and exits the room, leaving Katie to make her notes on ionic bonding and how giant ionic lattices are formed.

-x-

Twelve year old Katie Holt is lying on her bed, missing her brother beyond belief, when she hears her mother scream. Scared, Katie practically throws herself down the stairs to find her mother staring at the TV, tears streaming down her face as she sits, unmoving and silent, bar the occasional gasp as the reporter gives the story.

Katie reads the headline and her knees give out underneath her. Twenty year old Matt Holt's face flashes onto the screen, along with forty five year old Sam Holt and twenty four year old Shirogane Takashi.

Kerberos _scientists dead_ , the scrolling headline reads. _Pilot error_ , it says. _No survivors_ , it mocks.

No survivors.

Matt is gone.

Matt is _dead_.

Matt is...

Dead?

That can't be right. No. No way can that be right. Her father, her brother, her brother's best friend, are dead. They're all gone.

She drags herself into Matt's room. She throws herself into his bed and clutches his pillow to her chest. She rocks back and forth, not trying to calm herself down, but trying to prepare herself for the sudden onslaught of grief she knows will come in a few days when her brain accepts the news.

Something sharp is digging into her back. When she finally musters the energy to pull it out, she sees it's Matt's Rubik's cube. She almost starts to mix it up, but stops. This is Matt's and Matt is dead. This is too sacred for her to use.

Twelve year old Katie Holt sits on her brother's bed. Twelve year old Katie Holt doesn't cry. Twelve year old Katie Holt is too numb for tears.

-x-

Thirteen year old Katie Holt stands facing the mirror of a public bathroom. She's in the men's toilets in a seedy downtown club, dressed in Garrison uniform. She's disguising herself as a boy to get in the Garrison. They do accept girls, but Katie is transgender, and runs the risk of being caught out as Katie Holt. Instead, she disguises herself as fifteen year old orphan Pidge Gunderson.

Katie raises the scissors she holds in her left hand. She slides some of her hair, her lovely long hair that had taken her so long to grow out, and tries to prepare herself to cut it.

_I'm doing this for you, Matt_. _For you, Dad._ _For you too,_ _Shiro_ _. You're family now._

Katie breaths deeply. She steels herself, holding the scissors in shaking hands. _Time to become someone else._

Thirteen year old Katie Holt watches as her hair, her beautiful long hair, falls to the floor. There's no going back for her now.

-x-

Fifteen year old Pidge Gunderson shivers a little in the desert air. From her usual perch on the Garrison roof, she can see miles of sand. She's so focused on her equipment she doesn't notice her roommates, seventeen year old Lance McClain and seventeen year old Hunk Garrett, sneaking up behind her.

The next twenty minutes take all of two seconds. Lance and Hunk poke around her equipment and then there's a shooting star but no it's a ship and they're running and they're hiding and they see _him_ lying comatose on a table.

Twenty six year old Shirogane Takashi, the dead pilot of the failed Kerberos mission, lies on the table, very much still alive. It takes Pidge a few seconds to realise what this means.

Matt could still be alive.

_Matt could still be alive._

She feels a little superfluous during Shiro's rescue. Pidge does little more than hold onto Hunk and scream, she thinks, and she's sure that if she asked the others they'd give her some wishy-washy answer that means nothing. Except maybe the small man with the mullet- Keith, Lance said his name was. He'd tell her honestly she'd done nothing useful.

Shiro and Keith go outside to talk, leaving Pidge inside Keith's run-down desert shack with Hunk and Lance. She pulls Matt's Rubik's cube and stares at it. He's been gone for nearly three years and she still can't bring herself to use the damn cube. She sighs and swaps it for her own.

"Hey," Lance says, in his 'I'm going to ask a stupid question' tone. "What's wrong with the other one?"

"It's not mine," Pidge says, hoping that's going to be the end of it. But Lance has other ideas.

"Whose is it? Ooh, is it your girlfriend's?" He asks excitedly. Pidge sighs. She looks enough like Matt for her roommates to assume that the photo of her and Matt is of her and some mysterious girlfriend.

"No," Pidge says shortly, and avoids any further conversation with Lance.

"Geez," she hears Lance hiss to Hunk, "he's in a bad mood."

She pretends to herself that the word 'he' doesn't hurt as much as it does. She pretends it doesn't make her break a little inside. She pretends because she has to. For her.

For Matt.

Fifteen year old Pidge Gunderson clutches her Rubik's cube and tries not to cry.

-x-

Sixteen year old Pidge Gunderson kneels in front of a grave and screams until her throat is raw and her voice is hoarse. She tries to look at the place where her brother is buried but cannot see through the tears.

Twenty four year old Matt Holt is dead for the second time. And she's sure that this time, he's really gone. The little hope she'd kept alive is extinguished in a second and she doubles over, clutching her stomach in her grief.

She screams again, letting all of her anger, frustration, and loss out into the scream. It doesn't do anything productive, but it makes her feel a little better. Green gives her the space she needs, and for that, Pidge is grateful.

When the immediate grief is over and Pidge can look past the tears, she looks at the dates on the stone. It's her brother, yes, but his birthday is wrong. Matt isn't seventeen, he's twenty four. She stares dumbly, and suddenly, it clicks.

Matt has escaped death _again._ That's not a birthday, Pidge realises. It's-

"Coordinates," she croaks. "Matt, you're a genius."

She's crying again, this time from joy, and she whoops, sprinting back into Green, who purrs. "He's alive, Green," Pidge whispers, sagging with relief as she sinks into the pilot's chair. "He's alive."

_I knew he would be,_ Green sniffs, but Pidge knows she's happy for her.

"Shall we go find him?" Pidge asks.

_Say no more,_ Green winks, and they're gone.


End file.
